


Aftertaste

by RedHorse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Public kidnapping, Quidditch, non-con due to amortentia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 11:13:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20891177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: Harry noticed the handsome stranger before the game began.





	Aftertaste

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miraculous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miraculous/gifts).

> A fic written for Miraculous when she was sick, now edited and posted to AO3!
> 
> Heed the warnings! For the nature of the non-con you can find a more comprehensive (spoiler-y) warning in the end note.

Harry’s mother believed he inherited a bit of Seer’s intuition from James’ great-great grandmother. 

She’d first noticed it when he was a little boy; he’d turn his head toward the door and call out the names of unexpected visitors before they even knocked. She considered her suspicion confirmed when he easily took to pursuit of the Snitch. The sports writers in the  _ Prophet _ seemed to agree, hailing Harry as a supernatural player during his first season with PU.

That intuition fired when he arrived at the Quidditch Pitch for the away game in Romania and saw one member of the other team standing apart, arms crossed, looking at Harry.

Harry was used to being looked at. By random members of the public who knew he was the Minister of Magic’s son; by fans; and certainly by rival team members. There should have been nothing unusual about the assessing gaze of a stranger game-ready in his kit.

“Who’s that?” Harry asked, tilting his head toward his team’s first Chaser, a rangy wizard a few years older than Harry named Brice.

Brice frowned and followed Harry’s gaze. “Dunno,” he said. “Must be new, or a substitute. Never seen him.” He smirked a little. “I’d recall.”

Harry was confused for a moment, then he realized Brice was referencing the fact that the man was handsome. And he was (tall, lean but not to the point of appearing angular, and even from a distance his face had an aristocratic sort of appeal) but that wasn’t what had made Harry take notice. It was that same niggling feeling that had guided him in the past, but in which he’d never felt sure he should put any stock.

“Come on, Potter, we need to get changed,” Brice added, linking their arms. “You can moon over him out on the field. Not like you lazy Seekers have anything else to do while you’re hanging around overhead and letting us do all the work.”

“Right,” Harry said, still too distracted to joke, but he followed the rest of the team into the locker rooms. He hadn’t shaken the feeling, not even when he had a knee up against the long bench in front of the lockers for balance while he wrestled the form-fitting tunic over his head.

“Didn’t he seem a bit old for professional Quidditch?” he asked Brice.

Brice, having moved on from the moment entirely, looked at Harry like he’d lost the plot.

“The Romanian we saw,” Harry prodded, feeling ridiculous, but unable to let it go.

“I dunno,” Brice said, with a perplexed sidelong look at Harry before he bent to lace his boots. “Plenty of people play well into their fifties, and he didn’t look  _ that _ old.”

No, he hadn’t. Perhaps Harry was used to the general youth of most of the major players of the day. The coverage talked about that, how there was a fresh generation of players following a rash of retirements. The man who’d been watching Harry hadn’t a single grey hair, but there was something about him that seemed — Harry wasn’t sure — too mature, somehow, for sports.

He tried to shake it off. He had a game to play, and this wasn’t just any game, but a semifinal in his debut season. He needed that Snitch.

He held the thought in mind as they came up the ramp onto the Pitch and into the midmorning sunshine, the stands full of clamoring fans from both teams. Yet his gaze was immediately drawn toward the Romanian team, taking flight, one of them taller and starker than the rest with the breeze ruffling his dark curls…

Harry shook himself, got on his broom, and angled it sharply so that he could assume his favorite starting position where he had a clear view of the entire field. Some Seekers liked to gamble on good luck when the Snitch was released, but they missed the chance to see its general trajectory.

As the game got underway, Harry forgot about that unfamiliar opposing player. He was too absorbed in chasing the Snitch, or looking for it from his high-above vantage point when he missed a pursuit, which kept happening. The game had been so busy, and the Snitch so inclined to weave in and out of the action, that though Harry had spotted it twice and the Romanian Seeker had spotted it once, neither chase had ended well.

The game wore on, the goal-scores too close to call. The Snitch would still make the game for the team whose Seeker caught it, as was most often the case. But the clock could run out at this point, too, Harry mused, watching the shadows shift as the sun moved from its zenith and began to sink to the west. 

Then he saw it again, a flash of gold almost obscured by the bristles of the PU Chaser’s broom with which it was keeping an oddly perfect pace. Harry shot down toward it. The Chaser was flying in an arc, away from Harry, so he adjusted his own course for the most efficient interception. The other Seeker was halfway across the field, and most of the game play was centered there too, Harry thought with a familiar burst of excitement and adrenaline. He only had to pluck the Snitch from the air, and it would be over.

There was a blur of something in his peripheral vision as he closed in on his own teammate, whom hadn’t noticed Harry yet and would probably be scared silly when he did. Harry knew from experience that being flown toward at Seeker-speeds was an alarming feeling. He was having it now; the blur that was coming for him was unmistakably a fast flyer, which didn’t make sense because he’d been sure the other Seeker was too far across the field to already have gotten so close, so fast. No matter how good on a broom he might be.

Harry leaned in, refusing to be distracted, and saw the moment the Chaser — Bo Barker, a senior player — noticed Harry. His eyes were wide, then he realized the Snitch must be close to him and did a quick barrel-roll to check his blind spots. When he did, the broomstick moved neatly out of Harry’s way to reveal, for a flash, the Snitch. Then it disappeared again. But Harry, his sighting confirmed, pressed an extra ounce of will into the magic that imbued his Firebolt. He felt a very faint trembling in the wood from the strain, yet managed to accelerate a bit more.

The other Seeker, though, was matching Harry’s pace somehow. Harry couldn’t fathom how, nor could he resist an incredulous backward glance. What he saw almost made him pull up mid-flight.

It wasn’t the Romanian Seeker closing in on him. It was the unfamiliar player Harry had noticed twice now, and the niggling feeling had grown into a desperate itch.

Harry would have to deal with it later. For now, he needed to catch the Snitch, and there was no rule that said the Seeker had to be the one to do it. Apparently the Romanian had seen the Snitch and decided, being close, to try to intercept it before Harry could. Harry would normally be indulgently amused by the confidence of a non-Seeker trying to outfly him, but  _ this _ non-Seeker was doing a pretty good job of it so far. He was now abreast of Harry. Harry still had both hands on his broom, the Snitch still slightly out of reach. Bo had whipped into a dive to get out of the way.

The Romanian closed in another four inches, and with his longer reach, he could have gotten it. But he didn’t. Harry turned his head in confused frustration, and found that the Romanian wasn’t focused on the Snitch at all.

The wind had whipped his hair back, and the collar of his cape as well (what a nonsensical, antiquated uniform element for the Romanians to cling to) and Harry saw with an alarming level of detail that there was a mole on his throat, a penetrating red tint in his dark brown eyes and a dimple in his right cheek that accompanied a knowing smile.

Harry was close enough now to catch the Snitch, so he reached out and grabbed it. It wasn’t an impulse he could totally control; after so many years of play, he couldn’t help himself. Just as he did, though, the Romanian reached out and put his gloved hand on Harry’s elbow.

That meant that when the Port-Key in the Snitch dragged Harry into interstitial space, the Romanian stranger came along too. 

*

Nothing could really be done while one was being swept along the inexplicable path from here to there that constituted Apparition, but Harry held in his mind the way that the stranger’s hand felt on his elbow, and as soon as the world righted itself he tightened his thighs around his broom and bent his knees so he didn’t stumble on the ground he arrived so near, reached across his body with his unburdened arm and punched the stranger squarely in the jaw.

There was a satisfying crunch and a burst of pain in Harry’s knuckles. He’d hardly had the time or forethought to cast even the wandless  _ Protego _ to the knuckles that his godfather claimed to have invented. The stranger didn’t fall back, though, and his grip only tightened and turned wrenching on Harry’s arm.

_ “Incarcerous _ ,” he said, and Harry was suddenly encased in glowing rope from his hips to his shoulders, his arms snug against his chest. The position impeded his balance and the broom rocked beneath him. Harry took advantage of the motion, and his unbound legs, to kick his attacker as hard as he could in the shins. He didn’t so much as wince.

“Unfortunately for you,” he said with an indulgent sort of tone, his voice deep and distinctively English, “I had the forethought to Charm all my garments.” He rubbed his jaw with one hand, the other, which had been holding Harry’s arm before the  _ Incarcerous _ , now keeping a firm grip on Harry’s broom. “Unfortunately for me, I didn’t think to shield my face.”

Harry tried the last thing he could think of. He tilted his head back, bit down on his cheek til he tasted blood, then parted his lips to speak a few words of the only blood magic he knew (only for emergencies, his father, Remus and Sirius had made him promise when they taught him, during his father’s campaign and after the threat toward Harry from his opponents first occurred to them).

But he couldn’t make a sound.

“Also fortunately for me,” said his captor, “I anticipated you might be capable of a bit of crude ritual magic, so I took the liberty of imbuing my special Snitch with a touch-activated Tongue-Tying Charm.”

The man was standing, his broom nowhere in sight, while Harry continued to hover on his own obedient broom. He spoke calmly, conversationally, moving so that he had a hand on either side of Harry’s waist when the broom dropped, inert, to the ground. His steadying touch balanced Harry when he suddenly had to stand on his own two legs again. 

They were in a meadow hemmed with large, dense trees. In the distance was a small cabin. A green-gold glow imbued everything, courtesy of the way a net of white clouds was presently filtering the afternoon sunlight. It was a very strange scene. Not at all the sinister kind of thing one would normally think of as a kidnapper’s destination. 

Harry’s heart was pounding hard. He swallowed reflexively, then winced at the surprising flavor of blood in his mouth. He pressed the tip of his tongue into the cut in his cheek.

“I haven’t introduced myself,” murmured the stranger, “but you may call me Tom.”

Tom led Harry across the meadow toward the cabin. He kept his hand low on Harry’s back, and somehow Harry felt it there, a slight, directing pressure, despite the ropes.

“Since you may not speak, I’ll do the talking,” Tom went on kindly. “I had an unconventional upbringing, but I do know my manners. I learned them from my mother. Lovely woman. Well, not lovely in the way most people mean it, but she was very loving toward me. She cherished me, in fact. It is very pleasant for a child to be cherished. You understand that, don’t you Harry?” 

The grass was short and the ground was smooth beneath it, making it easy to pick his way. Harry was gripped by the surreality of his situation. He didn’t need that Seer’s intuition to understand he was in danger, and yet all of Tom’s behavior suggested that he was simply a guest in this meadow. In this cabin which proved to be tidy and lived-in, with two chairs angled toward one another on its small porch.

Tom lifted his hand and the door opened noiselessly, revealing a small but bright space inside, simple furniture in colorful upholstered fabric. It was like a better-composed, more mature version of the tastes that had informed the decor in Harry’s current flat, which he’d outfitted with a lot of enthusiasm but no instinct for cohesion. The result was a chaos of competing color and texture, but here the contrasting colors, the assortment of art in a variety of styles on one wall, and the mismatched tea-set ready on the little table, looked curated. Deliberately eclectic. The only item in the scene that didn’t seem staged for the cover of a magazine was an ordinary apothecary’s vial with a blank prescription label resting just beside the teapot.

Tom directed Harry to one of the chairs and sat across from him. His handsome face looked sympathizing. “I see that you’re confused, and frightened. Your fear is very interesting to me, you may as well know that now. But it isn’t warranted, not to its current degree. I have no intention of killing you. Or physically causing you any harm. On the contrary.” He leaned toward the table so he could take the cap from the vial and pour a measure of its contents into one of the teacups.

“Amortentia,” he explained, and Harry fought the  _ Incarcerous _ with such force he felt something snap in his left wrist.

He was almost glad he couldn’t speak, since if he could, he would have begged. It would have been horrible for his self-worth, to always have to recall having begged. Instead he sat there with tears pricking his eyes and watched in frozen horror while Tom added tea to the cup, carefully and precisely and without wetting the tablecloth with a single errant drop.

“It’s much better this way,” Tom soothed. “Originally, I’d planned something much different, but the more closely I observed you the clearer it became that this was the wiser approach. More pleasant for us both. You’re an intriguing boy.” He finished pouring for Harry and set the cup on the table before him. Harry thought, hysterically, that at least with his hands bound he wouldn’t be required to lift it to his own mouth.

“You’re strong-willed,” Tom said, his voice curling to a deeper pitch in the middle of the word with unmistakable approval, “but this should be a sufficient dose, nonetheless.” He lifted an open palm, tilted it to the right, and the cup lifted itself slowly from the table. Harry strained away, but the tea was rising, too, in a tiny midair stream like a snake. The  _ Incarcerous _ expanded to link him to the chair and a sticking charm adhered the chair’s legs firmly so that no matter how Harry thrashed against his bindings, it didn’t topple. The tea worked its way into the corner of his mouth and the magic bloomed on his tongue.

Harry was ready for it, which meant that for a long time, he was locked into the conflict in his head, rationality warring against the invasive magic. But the dose was strong and the brew was potent and even Harry couldn’t claim immunity to such powerful magic. 

When he became aware of his body again, wading slowly from the battleground in the back of his mind, he found he had his chin to his chest. His neck might have been sore from the strain of the position, if there weren’t long, strong fingers kneading the muscle there, and a second hand stroking his hair.

He lifted his head slowly and blinked. The chair where Tom had been sitting was now empty. The man was standing behind him, Harry realized, as Tom’s hands came to rest on his shoulders. The  _ Incarcerous _ was gone. Harry reached up and snatched Tom by the wrist, shoving himself away from the table with the other hand and spinning around. He was panting from the abrupt spike in adrenaline and the dizzy elation of being unbound. His whole body quivered with the confused desire for violence.

But then he saw Tom, and his pulse slowed and he ached with a different pain. A smile that was so heartfelt it felt involuntary took over his mouth. 

Tom was watching him expectantly, and seemed to see the final reaction settle in his face, because he kicked aside the chair that had wound up between them and pulled Harry into a gentle embrace. Harry returned it eagerly, shivering at the feeling of holding something so precious so closely for the first time. Tom was taller than him, which meant his head fit just so into the hollow of Tom’s upper chest below his breastbone. 

“You did this to me,” Harry said hazily, but all the outrage of the conflicting emotions was drowned by the bottled love he felt so much more intensely than anything else. “My mother is going to kill you.”

“You won’t tell her,” Tom murmured. “Now, step back where I can see you.”   
  
Harry reluctantly released Tom and took an awkward step back, which brought him up against the table. Tom pivoted them and moved Harry further away, then stepped back himself and crossed his arms. He looked assessing, Harry thought fondly. Just as he’d looked earlier that day when he’d spotted Tom watching him the first time across the field.

_ Handsome _ , Harry had thought him, earlier. What a ridiculously insufficient word. Tom was beautiful—a perfect balance of masculinity and refinement. He’d said he wanted to look at Harry, but Harry wanted to do more than look in return. He wanted to devour Tom with his eyes, remember every line and curve, to…

“Now, now,” Tom tsked, clucking his tongue. “Remain focused. It pleases me when you’re obedient. Don’t you care to please me?”

Harry’s mouth was suddenly hot and wet at the insinuation. “Y-yes,” he managed. “Oh, Merlin, yes. I want to please you. What can I…?”   
  
Tom began unfastening the closures on the Quidditch kit he still wore. “Undress for me, darling,” he purred. Harry’s hands shook with the effort of controlling them enough to unlace and untie and pull open all the elements of his uniform. He was so single-minded in his frustrated efforts to undress himself that by the time he was finally fully naked and looked up in triumph,Tom had undressed too. Harry’s breath caught at the sight of Tom in all his bare perfection, just as self-assured as he’d been fully clothed.

His ego was adorable, and perfectly deserved, Harry thought with painful affection. He tried not to whimper at the effort it took not to close the distance between them and please Tom however he could, immediately.

“Go to the bed,” Tom said, nodding toward the corner. Harry saw the telltale ripple a moment before a wall gave way and revealed an entire room that hadn’t been there before and would have been undetectable from the outside. It was as thoughtfully furnished as the rest of the home, and this evidence that Tom had gone to such trouble as to deduce what Harry liked, then recreate it for their first time together, made tears gather in Harry’s eyes.

“Go on,” Tom repeated, with the firm air of command. Harry rushed to comply, noticing the changing textures under his bare feet as he left the hardwood of the living area for the plush rug that covered most of the sleeping area. It was snowy white and soft as an owl’s down. Harry climbed onto the bed and then began to turn, but Tom was already there, catching him by the hips and positioning him how he liked.

Harry could have hyperventilated at the feeling of Tom’s hardness against him, the slick finger, the evidence that someone so flawless, so beloved, had any interest at all in Harry. The painful fullness, the pride in holding so still, being so good, despite the overwhelming instinct to squirm and get free. 

And all the while Tom leaned over him, murmuring into his neck, kissing his shoulder. “So very good. I’m so pleased. Better than I expected. So lovely.”

The surge of euphoria at making Tom come, or at least assisting him in some small way, made Harry feel like he’d come, too, he was suddenly so hot, his skin so over-sensitive, his limbs so loose. But as he collapsed onto his side, Tom wrapped around behind him so Harry’s back was nestled against his chest. Tom reached to Harry’s front with a capable hand and seized his weeping cock, and Harry realized that he hadn’t come yet and he wanted—needed—to, desperately. 

Tom kept speaking to him. “There, there. Don’t cry. In a few days we’ll have you all sorted. You’ll see. Lovely boy. I’ll be so pleased to see you come for me.”

It took no time at all for Harry to do as Tom asked. When he’d spilled into Tom’s palm he felt like something came untied in his chest. It was an anchor and without it he could sail away from the body in Tom’s arms, carefree. Below, a small, distant voice shouted itself hoarse with anger. It was Harry’s own voice, he realized, somewhere far away.

*

When Harry woke up, he smelled coffee and tasted the tacky sweetness of a dose of Amortentia on the back of his tongue. Given to him while he was asleep, he thought, smiling as he came awake. That was so very like his Tom.

Harry stretched and sat up, the blankets gathering around his waist. He looked out the window at the meadow. For some reason, the sight of that seamless green blanket distressed him rather than soothed him and he soon looked away.

In the kitchen Tom was arranging their breakfast. He was already dressed, which didn’t surprise Harry at first. Tom’s job at the Ministry meant he was always wearing formal robes, and he usually left for work shortly after Harry woke. But then Harry frowned.

“It’s Saturday. Why do you look so nice?”

Tom smiled indulgently at him, leaning over to kiss his cheek. He lingered there, and Harry turned his head a little so that Tom could briefly sniff at his neck and touch his tongue to the bite from the night before, which still stung.

“You forgot,” Tom said with an easy smile, straightening. “We’ve brunch with your family.”   
  
Harry groaned. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” Tom said, smiling smugly over the rim of his mug. “You’re telling them, or I’m telling them, all before noon.”

Harry pressed his hands to his face, and in so doing, noticed his ring. He held his hand out as he always did when he was reminded of the band there, and smiled stupidly at the trio of stones in their triangular setting.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll tell them. I’m the Gryffindor in this marriage, after all.”

Tom set down his mug and smiled so all his teeth showed. “I told you, didn’t I, that this was for the best?”

Harry took a sip of his own coffee. It was piping hot, and the bitterness was just the thing to wash away the lingering taste of the potion. “Yes,” he said when he’d swallowed. “You always know best.”

**Author's Note:**

> The non-con is amortentia-induced. The sex is not particularly explicit.


End file.
